Start-Up Places Pure Bet On Flash Memory

Data-storage systems that use chips instead of disks have been gradually moving into computer rooms, but are generally considered too costly for mainstream jobs. A Silicon Valley startup is betting it can change that.

Pure Storage

The company, Pure Storage, is one of many developing hardware that use the flash-memory chips that consumers know from devices like iPods and iPhones. Data can be fetched much more quickly from such chips than disk drives, and the technology offers substantial savings in energy consumption and greater reliability because it features no mechanical parts.

Pure says its storage systems can offer customers a ten-fold speedup over high-performance storage systems that use disks, while requiring one-tenth the power and space. What is more unusual is an accompanying cost claim–that its software can bring the benefits of that performance at a lower price than incumbent hardware.

“If you look at most customers, you don’t have to sell the benefits of flash–they want flash,” said Scott Dietzen, Pure’s chief executive. “The revolution was there, but they just couldn’t afford the revolution.”

The closely held company on Tuesday is announcing its plans along with an unspecified investment from the venture-capital arm of Samsung Electronics, the biggest flash-memory maker. The Korean company is supplying the startup with so-called solid-state drives that use its chips, while contributing to a $30 million funding round that brings helping the total raised by the company to date to $55 million.

Low-end disk drives–the kind found in PCs–remain much less expensive than flash memory per gigabyte of data stored. Pure plans to target another class of storage systems that use more costly, faster-spinning disk drives that allow users to retrieve data at greater speed.

Claiming better than price-parity with those systems still requires a leg up from software. Pure says programs it has developed sharply reduce the size of data files that its systems store on flash chips–so they typically fit in one-fifth to one-twentieth of the space they now take up on the high-speed storage disks.

Space-saving software has been used for years on some disk-based systems, particularly those used for long-term storage. But those techniques tend to slow data retrieval so they are not used on the high-end storage systems used for many priority business chores.

Vendors charge $5 to $10 per gigabyte of capacity on those systems, Dietzen says. Its systems won’t have the physical capacity to store as much raw data as those machines, but the compressed data files they generate yield a price per “usable” gigabyte of storage of less than $5, he adds.

Customers testing the company’s products verify the ten-fold speed-up. One is Jeff Gelz, a vice president and chief information officer at MatterSight, a company that helps others analyze recordings of their customer-service calls. He added that a Pure system that has the physical capacity of six terabytes of raw data serves essentially as a 20-terabyte system because of the software compression.

Each machine is also a lot smaller, and generates less heat.”It’s cool, and it feels like a preview of the future,” says Matt Kesner, chief information officer for Fenwick & West, a big Silicon Valley law firm that has also been testing the system.

Pure, though it hasn’t disclosed details of its technology before, has attracted attention because of its management. Its chief technology officer, John Colgrove, played a similar role in developing technology for Veritas, a pioneer in storage software whose operations are now part of Symantec. Dietzen is a former senior vice president at Yahoo, which purchased his startup Zimbra, and former chief technology officer at BEA Systems, which purchased another startup called WebLogic that he helped lead. Another recent recruit is Michael Cornwell, who was lead flash designer for the iPod and iPhone at Apple and later worked on flash-based prods at Sun Microsystems.

Investors in Pure include Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum, the husband-and-wife duo that founded VMware, and the venture-capital firm Greylock Partners. Aneel Bhusri, one of the firm’s partners, compares the Pure’s prospects to Data Domain, a storage company that was purchased by EMC in 2009 for $2.1 billion. “Pure has the ability to be a lot bigger than Data Domain,” he says.

But there will be stiff competition, from both large and small companies. EMC Corp., the biggest maker of data-storage systems, has also embraced flash-based technology and sells hardware that lets users mix and max combinations of chips or disk drives for storage.

There are also some startups with influential friends. Fusion-io, which went public this summer, also attracted an investment from Samsung. Violin Memory is working with Toshiba, another major flash-chip supplier.

Donald Basile, the former CEO of Fusion-io who now leads Violin, says his company offers comparable price-per gigabyte prices to Pure’s without the benefit of compression, and could do even better with it. “Pure has the best team on paper,” he says, but he questions whether space-saving software will be a unique differentiator. “We will ship it, too, but we don’t make a big noise about it,” he says.

But some analysts are more enthusiastic, particularly about the broader point that flash-based technology is going to be a disruptive factor that will keep taking jobs from disks in data centers. Pure is “one company, but one company that represents a wave of companies,” says Mark Peters, a senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group.

As for Samsung, which is trying to promote the energy-efficiency benefits of flash, any products that help spread that message to enterprises “is something we are definitely interested in,” says Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing and product planning for Samsung’s semiconductor unit.